27 June 2019
Equinix, the US data centre and internet connection specialist, has opened a £90 million colocation facility in Slough – its ninth around Greater London and 12th in the UK.
The firm said the flagship bit barn, known as LD7, offers space for 1,750 server cabinets immediately and will be expanded to 2,625 cabinets at some point in the future.
The new data centre is located in an industrial suburb of Slough – the de facto bit barn capital of the UK. It is home to more data centres than any other place in the country, including four existing Equinix facilities.
LD7 has a chilled water-cooling system, combined with adiabatic pre-cooling.
In addition, it offers access to more than 90 network providers and several transatlantic fibre cables linking the UK and the US.
Equinix said this enables 30 millisecond latency to New York.
The project is part of the company’s £295 million investment in the UK infrastructure throughout 2018/19.
In addition to LD7, Equinix is spending £94 million to expand LD9 (formerly known as Telecity’s Powergate), £82 million to expand LD10 (formerly operated by IO) and another £24 million to expand LD4.
Outgoing prime minister, Theresa May, welcomed last year’s announcement to create LD7 as a sign that the country is still a viable target for investment, even amid Brexit uncertainty.
“Equinix’s investment reflects the growing demand for digital financial services in the City of London and is a vote of confidence in its future as the world’s premier financial hub,” she said. “This is exactly where we want to be heading,”
Including all the current expansion projects, Equinix will have invested over £900 million in the UK’s infrastructure.
The company said its expansion plans support London as a “financial hub” and one of the leading cities for business, regardless of the outcome of the UK’s planned departure from the European Union.
Equinix lists all three of the world’s largest cloud vendors – AWS, Azure and GCP – among its customer base and operates over 200 data centres spanning 52 territories.
